Random thoughts on a variety of things but mainly on learning and teaching…

I was looking through boxes in the garage for the posters I bought in Barcelona in 2007 to decorate my classroom with now that I am embarking on teaching Spanish – (very exciting but just a” leetle bit” scary too!) when I came across the cards that colleagues gave me when I left the UK. One of them had this Calvin and Hobbes cartoon on it which I think is a great thought to hold onto;

The same card also had this wonderful outlook on life from Martin Luther King, which I will try to quote to my students and indeed my sons. I think it is a very humbling thought and one which, in a world where we constantly encourage our youngsters to strive to attain qualifications so that they can get well-paid, professional jobs that are perceived to be the only positions worth having, reminds us that everybody has a role to play in society and everyone should try to fulfil that role to the best of their abilities.

“If a person is called to be a streetsweeper, they should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote porty. They should sweep streets so well that all the host of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great streetsweeper who did their job well.”

“Authority is supposedly grounded in wisdom, but I could see from a very early age that authority was only a system of control and it didn't have any inherent wisdom. I quickly realised that you either became a power or you were crushed” Joe Strummer